That One Sock

That one sock 

@ CaffeinatedJunk: An essentially mellowed down version of myself.
Most of my work at https://caffeinatedjunk.blog/ would gravitate towards health, feminism, consumerism, technology aversion, what's-left-of-capitalism, fictional references to morbid realities of life, a certain dysfunction that finds a home in otherwise preoccupied minds aching to create

Punctuated Scoop

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again - Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

These are lessons I swallowed up along the way and lessons in the making that I scribble on grocery lists, the back of an old economist, on a memory charter that grew dysfunctional in time and on walls yet to crack open

The first one is a weird statistic I have been musing over ever since I have had the luxury of time on my hands from not having to fix broken pieces of a vase that I once thought to be my raison d'etre

Little did I realize that these pieces were never meant to be fixed and their beauty lay in hopelessly lying around. 

My vase was a gorgeous cerulean blue in its prime and the beauty that seeped from its nearly perfect shape and form was astonishing. 

But the more I look the more I realize how perfect each broken piece of the same vase is and how each broken edge adds to a finish that seems nothing short of breathtaking and yet surprisingly and holistically complete

 

We are all vases – tall blue, short green, luminous, crimson, earthy, glass, Greek, porcelain, brittle, broken

Back to the weird statistic: the number of smart, single beautiful and genuinely interesting women I have known are hopelessly vulnerable to bouts of incredibly low self-esteem and are living with a horrifyingly flawed assumption of not being ‘good enough’ for themselves and the people around them. This statistic has been disturbingly gnawing at me and sometimes I wake up to be such a woman

I love how dangerously forgetful men can be in the matters of their heart and their own taking. The only time you know they are acting stupid is when they confuse ambition and foresight

And yet it could only take a man (a man who we all wish would exist more often) to culture and grow a feminist prerogative, because only then would it be appreciated and not taken for granted 

So here goes an honest confession made well before its time: I am sorry I cried foul. I am sorry I said it was all about sexism because it isn’t and it never was. I do not defend my gender anymore.  Selective sexism is here to stay. I think I appreciate the fact that we are all terribly flawed and the only way to deal with this massive unfairness is to know where each one of us is coming from.

What I do, however, defend in all honesty is courage in the face of defeat and a kind of rare courage that will never show, but will glisten on your forehead and trickle down the back of your ear. You know this is a defeat that will have a brighter tomorrow

So I decided to take a step back, to look at the world as you might not see it. There are traces of your own life missing color and you have to fill them up – that is your streak of madness, your streak of sanity waiting to be withheld, waiting to be snatched away and yet so desperately wanting to stay

And I was a child again, running back to where it started, prioritizing aspects of my life I have no control over, giggling until the alcohol wears off, filling in journals with details that define the infinite aspects of pointlessness, falling asleep at odd hours, dreaming big, clutching at my coffee mug like there is no tomorrow. This was healing I suppose

This time I pack my bags humming ‘the Voyager’ by Jenny Lewis

She asked to be ruined after all. Yes she did, she even begged for it

14:23 hours. Sunday.

‘’The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate & predictable that you have so few of them.’’

-          Ned Beauman

From here on each of my posts would be flagged by a quote that left me wide eyed and scrambling for a pen.

Also, you don’t need to write a book to use a quote. No pressure.

14:23 hours. Sunday.

I was am a wreck, I can’t possibly expect a half-baked blog post to come to my aid. Not even the half bottle of Vodka that my dimpled boy left over from the night before, not the ‘not eating’ and not the trying to sleep my life away. None of it sweetheart. None of it you whore.

All the while I was writing this post I must tell you I switched screens thrice to work on an email and never got around to completing it.

Thought: Obsessive compulsive cleaning doesn’t work out too well when you deprave yourself of caffeine.

Ever tried making a list of Murphy’s laws that apply to your life? I tried mine over the weekend and I realized this could just be ‘the book’ that I never ended up finishing.

My ‘Warhol’ course evidently added to the blur. The blur and the preoccupation that always was, and only until recently that which turned out to be the mainstay of my half-baked existence. It was a beautiful blur though.

Week one of the course was reading, reading and more reading followed by interviews where Warhol knew better than to make sense. The handouts included a section on ‘The Pinocchio theory’ (I could take these thoughts to bed, night after night)

Warhol says that each of us has an exchange value – a fetishistic aura that far exceeds its materialistic and utilitarian properties as objects.

The argument of ‘cult value’ v/s ‘exhibition value’ was a loss/loss.

At the end of it, we conclude that your ‘aura’ is different from your ‘product’ but both of them are for sale.

I tried to use the phone less, I knew I sounded a mess as well.

This is my third black coffee at the café. It would be incredibly embarrassing to down a fourth cup, but to hell with it.

My idea of vacation would be a sabbatical. On weekends, I study art by myself. There is nothing entirely wrong with me. I haven’t swallowed up the bitter pill, not as yet. Don’t intend to. They make you slow. (PS: This just happens to be the era of microblogging and four worded sentences are absolutely not retarded anymore)

All of this would have been incredibly funny if it didn’t come with a clause. A clause that claimed that my best attempts to organize myself were falling off the hook. That’s life and that’s art – colors, lines, textures and hues. Sometimes there is a pattern to it.

A conclusion: I did fine, I think. I didn’t wreck a marriage or cheat on the love of my life or kill somebody or vandalize property.

My life isn’t that bad, but hey, at least I am trying to be creative about it.

To my lover, who taught me the art of disappearing

To my lover, who taught me the art of disappearing

I walk over to the counter to redeem myself. It is 3 a.m. I do not know what I am looking for. I am not just looking for it, I very well intend to pay for it, even though my hair is unkempt and my clothes speak of a madness that never was. 

The drug store owner hands me a strip of yellow pills – the size of insect eggs.

One year into a life I never thought I would be living and I was a joyless, sexless, clueless nobody.

The drug store owner looks at me with eyes that scream – Run over to the bookstore next door and buy the Book of Love.

Its 3 a.m. Bookstores close, memories snap, love grows sour and all you are left with is bad timing.

He runs his hands over the sharp edge of the strip – What do you know of failing?

Before anything else, you had to know this – She was easy, easy to fall in love with.

What do you know of not wanting to be here? Not wanting to be you?

As my lover, you should know, it is a terrible time to talk about the economy. We are a faltering civilization and you can’t use it as an excuse to bail out on what we had.

The other day I read about the soaring ‘lipstick index’ – We are wining. We are ironically undefeated. 

Cloudy, gloomy days, days that beg you to dive headfirst into a peaceful slumber. These days have me thinking of you

I think of you waiting at the airport. That’s how I always picture you – nervous, alone, waiting, wanting to go, indifferent to goodbyes.

There are so many bits of you that need due consideration, you never cease to amaze me.

‘I’d date me,’ you’d say or something equally ridiculous, as you washed the very last of the dishes pouring a part of you down the sink.

Sometimes you’d cook for yourself and lay out a table for two even though you knew no one was coming. Because an empty plate made you feel safe, because I knew you better than that, because you could eat your words and never have anything to say ever again.

Metaphors never happen, they are just there for you to pick up. Among those many things, I can’t even name the ones I miss the most –

A half open window, an unmade bed, an untouched cup of tea, garbage bags lying at the door, waiting to be thrown out, the smell of guilt.

When you can't subscribe, you bastardize.

“There is plenty of ground beneath rock bottom,” who said that? I did, when I was 17 and drunk on life and a slew of thoughts that got me floored at my worst hours.

I’m 25 now and the only inspiration to get me out of bed is really bad coffee at office and it took me 10 minutes to come up with that.

Is that what it is? The price of not being exceptional? The price of hanging in there? How about a nice big cup of stupid instead?

I’ve been through what you’d call a hazy few months: A whiff of controversy. Imagined scandal. Testosterone. Don’t get me started on feminism. Well earned arrogance at the end of the day. The price of being professional.

11 am: I skim through my laundry list of clients. This is how we operate, stock prices swell up, and data spills over. Coffee cups pile up. Breakfast bars are a thing.

Lunch is peaceful. Finally, there is some wind in my hair.

Sometimes I read up on oil and sustainability, look up Latin words, Reuters, China, Pfizer.

I make a mealy mess forking deals. Sometimes I clean up. Sometimes I am told that I am being played. Weird men you know, like to start their days with quotes.

Have I lost my mojo? Does the pleasure of drinking wine at 8 pm in the perfect glass outweigh events that led me to ask myself that question?

On Saturdays I drag my working class ass to the park, sometimes I scribble. Scraps of paper do it for me like fancy notebooks never could or would.

You have to realize that I am a straight shooter and that I won’t shut up.

I am such a dog waiting to grow wild,

I am holding my breath, watching the sun

I am dreaming of all the mistakes I’ve made

I am sick of his gold rimmed notebooks and his copybook charm

I am trying to stretch my imagination of this city.

I am trying to be gone, I am minding the gaps

I am trying to reach out, I am hanging on by a thread. 

Of Lullaby Springs and Damien Hirst ( Additional notes from the under deck - no convenience charge )

Natasha Choukkar – on why she is good at what she does and why she hasn’t been doing enough of it.

So these are "literary" notes from the under deck that have been scribbled on planes, buses, parks, outside grand museum stairs and motel note pads, sometimes fancier notepads and Pierre Cardin’s (with a cold metallic sheen) that don’t really subscribe to our generation.

And as I am writing this from a sublime and terribly gorgeous place in Whitefield's where the rain trickles down the window pane every ten minutes and skylights brighten up the room at dawn, I am thinking of all the things I swallowed up on my way here: 

These were the things I did take a very long time to learn about myself:

• I have vacation issues
• I deliberately like to torture myself by carrying the wrong books on my journey to help me get to write. Suicidal, ain't it?
• My life is not a Roy Lichenstein version of Sleeping Girl, it really isn’t. My life revolves more around every conceivable Jasper John’s you could ever find. Some people confuse it to be something like Degas and his drying women. Like seriously? Get a life.
• I can’t sleep on most nights – too much coffee and the fear of being rendered redundant gnawing at me.
• This is not a place to soul search
•  Having fun is hard work and you of all people should know that (Yes you, D)
•   I don’t have shiny hair either ( I’m talking to you D, don’t look away)

    Here’s what I have been doing when I haven’t been eating weird meat– reading up on Damien Hirst. Hirst is a man who sold his thoughts. Period. Love him or hate him for that. So you could blame Hirst for me throwing up stuff about me which shouldn't be surprisingly shocking if you've known me already and come this far.

    We live in a society with questionable moral ethics; need we blame our artists for their questionable artistic ethics?  I am trying after all to be almost as transparently fair as I can be. (D?)

Woman, are we ready to talk about your day yet?

I am glad I get to you, in bits and pieces though, I still get to you.

I recite my thoughts like a hymn waiting to unfold, itchy at the edges. My life somehow makes sense when sprawled across a post it.

I define my own tools and I define my failure and I notice.

Anger and creative hindsight – these are the tools with which I learn best. I guess I am not ashamed of being angry anymore, or bored or indifferent. I hung my shame out to dry and wither in the hot summer sun.

Having done that I now trust all the unfairness in the world to shake things up and stir up a storm.

If I see a beautiful bald woman and I can’t write about her – I call it a failure. I define my own failures.

I did see her today; she was the most beautiful woman I saw in a very long time. She was dressed all summery ready to swallow the sun if she had to, with piercing eyes that could take or leave all.  I realized it wasn’t her beauty that wrecked me; it was something that clamored back at me when she looked me in the eye. 

Where does she get that perverse yet astonishingly satishfying freedom from? - the one thing that I have been looking for all my life.

Happy fucking woman’s day – I mutter under my breath.

I don’t get what Woman’s Day is about – yes I am grumpy and no I didn’t dress up; yes I didn’t do my hair. Yes I got drunk, yes I’m in love, no I don’t do God anymore, or marriage – the institution repels me, suffocates me. I could do yoga, I could never give up meat, I am not a limited edition.

I sweat the details, for all practical purposes I adore the wrong kind of men, adulthood won me over when I was five.

I am not very excited about being a woman, probably because I am a feminist and I chose to run to the man I love to help me fix things I broke in the first place.

But I refuse to be a Stepford wife, I refuse to be told right and wrong because who let you decide all that stuff in the first place anyway.

Why be told you’ve come a long way? Isn’t that limiting ambition? Why be told you are lucky to be where you are?  Is that what we are going to do – keep telling ourselves how lucky we are? That we weren’t burnt or scarred or raped? Is that what we want to live off for the rest of our lives – luck? And what if we happen to be not so lucky one of these days?  Would we have run out of luck?

I get what tradition is all about – I however fail to understand what losing freedom is all about.

That kind of submission is worse than rectal smuggling.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – I notice. I notice the way you hold your coffee mug – I think it is truly fucked up. 

Yours Sincerely,

More bad grammar and lazy writing.